I don't really care how much the latest superhero film took at the box office, although I'd probably know if you asked me. When I watch a film the main thing I am looking for is a good story. I like it when I look up at the big screen and can see a part of me staring back at me. More than anything, I am still looking for Jimmy Stewart and Jack Lemmon and Billy Wilder in every film I see.

Wednesday, 3 August 2011

Your Personal Story

It's your life. You paint it in all the colours and captions and stories that make it meaningful. Your favourite book sits up on the shelf and only you could ever know what it means to you. When you try and explain it, it loses something. And the other person will never feel the same.

Some movies just connect with you. In you. Through you. They feel like home. They are home. You put in the DVD and disappear into another world, yet somehow it feels like a portal to your own world, to who you really are.

We all have that song. You're in your car and it comes on the radio, or filters through a sound system from a building across the street. And you just feel it. You feel the essence of who you are. It's your song.

The art that you live by defies time and distance. Chaplin is long dead, but he can still reach you. Elton John could be at a party in New York, but a song he recorded thirty-five years ago can reach your headphones when you're walking down a rainswept street on the outskirts of Berlin. There are no limits. We don't even need the record, or the DVD; they live in our heads. Our hearts.

We get lost in fashion. Lost in the latest releases. And people look at you like there's a right and a wrong. But whether you're cool or fashionable doesn't matter when you're alone in a dark room at 4am. All that matters is who you are.

You build your personal story.

Bricks made of pop songs and heartbreaks and road trips and arguments and death and life and fights and cinema visits and folded pages. Every single moment is a moment to dive in. Watch a movie, dream about a girl who played you a song long ago, read your favourite book again and again and again. Each time, you get closer to who you are and where you came from. And if you dive in enough, you find out where you're going.